The revolutionary naturalistic influence of Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio (1571-1610) on 17th-century painting in Italy and across Europe is examined here and is augmented through the art of dozens of his contemporaries and disciples—works like George de La Tour's Mary Magdalene with the Smoking Flame and Artemisia Gentileschi's Judith Slaying Holofernes—seen in colour plates and extensively captioned. As Edmund Capon assays in his introduction, Caravaggio's observations of the language of the human instinct and body—the casual glance, the indifferent shrug, the weary slump, the accusing finger—are as true today as they were four centuries ago.